Beginner's Guide to Learning to Play Guitar

Learning to play guitar is something a lot of people want to do in their lifetime. Everyone loves music and as far as instruments go, the guitar is always one of the most common instruments that people want to learn to play.

Learning to do anything can be discouraging if you don't succeed right away, especially the acoustic guitar. The acoustic guitar can be hard at first but with practice, you'll eventually be happy with your progress. The problem with learning to play guitar is that your dominant hand strums and your weaker hand holds down the strings. The problem with this is that usually your finger strength isn't well developed so when you try to play a note or a chord, it doesn't like you would hope.

A lot of times it's also hard for people to do two different things with both hands at once. A good way to practice is to first practice just strumming and picking different notes. Separately, practice holding down strings to make chords or individual strings for single notes. Then put these together. It will be a while until you make anything that sounds good. But don't let it discourage you. Once you have developed more manual dexterity from just messing around, you can start playing music. In the meantime, your fingers will probably suffer a lot because they have to get used to holding down metal strings. After a while, your fingers will develop a callous and it will stop hurting when you play.

A lot of people want to learn to play guitar to play their favorite songs. So to bypass learning to read music, many will take a shortcut and use tablature, or tabs. Guitar tabs can be found anywhere online and some of the best websites include:

www.ultimate-guitar.com
www.guitaretab.com
www.911tabs.com

These are just to name a few. You should pick a simple song to practice before you move on to more complicated songs you might want to play. A lot of people start with "Come as You Are" by Nirvana to practice picking individual notes. Strumming chords can be harder and usually comes a lot later when your fingers are strong enough to hold down many strings at once.

Reading guitar tabs can also be a tad confusion at first. What you have to keep in mind that guitar tabs are like a picture of the guitar. Your guitar has six strings starting with the thickest string at the top which is counter-intuitively the sixth string. The thinnest string at the bottom is the first string. Tabs basically show you a picture of the guitar as if you were holding it in playing position and then put it flat on your lap with the sound hole facing up. The picture on the tabs should then match your view of the guitar with the thick string at the bottom and the thin string at the top.

The tabs will then have numbers on the. The numbers represent the fret you should put your finger on to get the right sound. The frets are separated by lines all down the neck of your guitar so if the tabs say 3 you'll want to put your finger on the third fret counting from the head of the guitar down to the body.

If this sounds confusing, you can probably find a visual diagram or a tutorial video on YouTube that can make it easier to understand.

When you start getting the hang of it, you should try to find tabs that have the picture of chords along with the name. That way you eventually start associating making that chord formation with the chord name and you will slowly learn to play chords just by reading the names. For more advanced players, this is good for playing entire songs. You can find chord tabs which have the lyrics to a song with the chord name over them so you know at what word you should change chords.

One final note to remember is that when you first start to play chords, it will be very hard to change chords quickly. But the only solution is practice. With a lot of practice and dedication, you will gain speed as well as perfect your sound. With these simple hints, you can easily teach yourself to play guitar.